>Why don't you look for some sort of charitable institution that needs software. You wouldn't get paid for writing it, but you could put it on your resume. And if you are unemployed anyway, what else are you going to do with your free time?

On that topic, two years ago I did a CodeCast show on http://GiveCamp.org. While these are events in many cities around the U.S., each city has a contact and they do ongoing efforts outside of the weekend gathering itself. It might be a good place to start for finding and selecting a volunteer project to participate in. While it is mostly Microsoft platform related, I think work as been done in PHP, Ruby, WordPress, Duple, etc. for websites.

CodeCast Episode 62: GiveCamp with Chris Koenig
http://www.code-magazine.com/codecast/index.aspx?messageid=12380a14-4a80-46e3-9d0b-4dc3223b219e

In this episode of CodeCast, Ken Levy interviews Chris Koenig, a developer evangelist for Microsoft in the Dallas, Texas offices. This is an in-depth discussion about the history, status, and roadmap for GiveCamp events in various cities. GiveCamp was an idea hatched by Chris a few years ago, and now there are many GiveCamp events organized around the country with expansion plans this year. GiveCamp is a weekend long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. Some events focus on a specific technology like Microsoft .NET using Visual Studio or Expression Web. But using other technologies is often a possibility such as using Graffiti, Sitefinity, DotNetNuke, Wordpress, Joomla, mojoPortal, Drupal, etc. The custom software created at GiveCamp could be a new website, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, Facebook page, a rich client or even a mobile application..This episode of CodeCast is educational for any developers or organizers considering volunteering to participate in and benefit from an upcoming GiveCamp event.